Energy Sustainability

Citizen Vote Required?

In Ms Van Pelt’s presentation, she alluded to the fact that staff did not feel it necessary to take the various funding mechanisms/proposals to a public vote. Over the course of the discussion, three reasons were presented: (1) staff did not want to take funding to a vote because that might become a proxy for whether the Kyoto initiative was appropriate and that issue had already been decided by the City Council in 2002 without a vote of the public (2) votes are expensive, and (3) the staff had already polled various citizens and received an overwhelmingly positive response to ‘reducing green house gases’.

The constitutional issues of whether these new methods of collecting the money (proposals 1 and 2 above) represent a new tax (and therefore must be brought to a vote of the citizenry) under TABOR requirements was not addressed.

Staff did note that in any event, an increase in the trash tax from approximately $280,000 per year to approximately $600,000+ per year on residences only (commercial real estate is already taxed to the maximum under current TABOR authority) is available to the City in any event.